Manuel Pellegrini (cont)

[cleavers]

What i meant by that is that we will have to improve on that points total this and in coming years as teams who've been in transition with managers, settle and improve (Chelsea/United). the quality at the top of this league is going to shoot up in the next three years as Chelsea/United start to seriously go for the league each year. and we can! we can improve on that 86 points and will have to improve all round to do so.

So, with more team challenging for the title, and better teams, the winning points total will go up ? Can't see it, more, better, teams, will take more points off each other, so its likely to go down not up.

Anyway good to see the clairvoyance group on bluemoon is alive and well.

 

[Juan King]

What i meant by that is that we will have to improve on that points total this and in coming years as teams who've been in transition with managers, settle and improve (Chelsea/United). the quality at the top of this league is going to shoot up in the next three years as Chelsea/United start to seriously go for the league each year. and we can! we can improve on that 86 points and will have to improve all round to do so.

So, with more team challenging for the title, and better teams, the winning points total will go up ? Can't see it, more, better, teams, will take more points off each other, so its likely to go down not up.

Anyway good to see the clairvoyance group on bluemoon is alive and well.

I knew that you were going to say that!

 

[mobrien93]

Hi there, I am a university student at the University of Central Lancashire undertaking some research on two football clubs and looking at the relationship between social media and football. I would really appreciate if you could give 5 minutes of your time to complete this short questionnaire. Thanks.

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[BillyShears]

Looking backwards at Mancini and lamenting that you think he was a better tactician is neither constructive nor worthwhile both in terms of a general discussion and in terms of trying to nut out where Pellegrini stands as a manager this season. The Mancini ship has sailed and invoking his name every time City go through a bad spell is counterproductive.

I’ve taken 24 hours out and ended up reading a lot of pretty harsh critiques of both him, and Txiki and Ferran from all corners of the internet. Once again the knives are out and Pellegrini (and City) are being held to a standard no other club is held to ever. It’s beginning to feel like I’ve taken some kind of happy pill which is stopping me from seeing the ‘real’ situation at City because most of what I read, I’m still struggling to take particularly seriously.

Maybe it’s because there seems to be a real scattergun approach to the criticism being leveled at Pellegrini which is pretty contradictory. Just one example – on the one hand our transfer business has been wretched in the last 3 years if I’m to believe the characterisations made in certain quarters. If that is the case, then purely from a management/coaching point of view, Pellegrini surely has done a remarkable job. When you consider last season’s achievements and then consider how finely poised this season is in the competitions which really matter, then I’d say it’s quite a trick for any manager to consistently be given inferior players and yet still remain competitive at the level at which he’s required to be.

Another constant complaint is “too much rotation”. This is the classic armchair complaint that is completely at odds with the modern game and the modern approach to sports science. Pellegrini doesn’t make unilateral decisions on who should be rotated when. It’s a decision the medical staff are involved in based on the fitness of certain players. You can’t continually ignore rotation whilst we win football matches but then blame rotation whenever we don’t win them. The manager for his part isn’t going to pick sides which he thinks are inferior simply for the sake of it, and he equally isn’t going to simply rotate for the sake of it.

I feel compelled to defend the decision to play Boyata against Boro primarily because I felt he had an excellent game. It wasn’t his inclusion that led to the Boro goals, nor was it his inclusion that led to City being so tepid in the second half as an attacking force. Similarly, playing Milner and Fernando as a central pairing. We go back to the incredibly contradictory nature of the criticism which Pellegrini is faced with. To a man the big James Milner fans all think his best position is central midfield. He’s a player who whenever he’s left out of a side, any dropped points are because he was left out, and yet because he was quite frankly garbage (again) against Boro, the hindsight wisdom is now on the “pointless rotation should’ve played Fernandinho” train. To me playing Milner over Fernandinho was a decision so obvious that I didn’t even consider it rotation. With Toure away our central midfield options are limited. More importantly with Toure away Fernandinho is our most important midfield player. There was an option to rotate and not risk him and the manager took it. I accept the same argument could be made in various positions on the pitch, but to me that one was pretty obvious even from before the match.

The season as a whole is another thing in which my view seems completely diametrically opposed to others and I’m struggling to see why people are so far at the other end of the spectrum. Yes the football hasn’t been as swashbuckling and as free flowing as it was during our purple patch last year, but ultimately the team is sent out there to win first and foremost, and it’s not like we’ve suffered from Arsenal, United, Liverpool levels of averageness. The accepted wisdom even from the most biased corners of the media world is that positions 1 & 2 in the league will be between us and Chelsea. Ergo we might not be winning at the speed of knots we were winning at last season, but nor is it fair to characterize this season as one which is fucked or one in which we’re going backwards. (I’ll reevaluate that if we’re 10 points or more behind Chelsea at any point). We have a 5 point gap against a team which has been nothing but lauded from the start of the season. This whilst coping with having the spine of the team missing for nearly two months. That’s not an excuse by the way, everyone has injuries, but it’s a reality in that too many injuries in key positions can turn close games in the opposition’s favour. Again, this is football.

Another thing which to me is a red herring is this whole “our defence is shambles” nonsense. Yes, from set pieces (both attacking and defending) we’ve been very poor this season. However in open play we are pretty much where we were last season in terms of our defensive play. The difference is that we’ve got two new key components in the team who simply aren’t settling at the rate at which we’d like. Of course it would’ve been amazing if Mangala had hit the ground running but he hasn’t, when you couple this with Vinny’s injuries, it has meant an ever changing backline and one which is equally capable of shutting out Roma and conceding two against Burnley. Absolutely the buck stops with the manager, but that doesn’t mean the manager is incompetent or that he isn’t good enough for where we want to be. Lest we forget Mourinho’s Chelsea have shipped six goals against Spurs and four against Bradford in the last month or so.

I don’t think my position on Pellegrini is anymore entrenched than a normal Blue’s should be. I thought he fucked up his team selection against Arsenal – I said so. I felt he was in danger of losing the support of the players in the wake of the debacles against QPR, CSKA, etc because that’s what happens when the arse falls out of a team, but him and the players turned it around.

People keep referencing our 12/13 title defence as a parallel to this season, many with the point of view that just as Mancini was sacked for not winning anything, so the same fate will befall Pellegrini. Again this is a facile reading of a complicated situation. We don’t need to go through the bones of it all again but it’s safe to say that Mancini’s problem wasn’t on the pitch but off it. Just as it will come to pass that even a disastrous finish to this season will not see Pellegrini removed from his position, no matter how strongly we finished the 12/13 season Mancini was always going to be sacked.

Apologies for the long post.

 

[supercity88]

Some good points raised M.A and I generally agree with your outlook. I really don't why many think Pellegrini is a great man manager but a poor tactician. I don't know if people just hear that mentioned elsewhere and regurgitate but it's simply not true. Pellegrini has a higher win percentage than Mancini which suggests he gets his tactics right more often. He might not change things during the game to such an extent as Mancini did, but then you could argue why would we need to if things were correct more often than not from the start?

My criticism of Pellegrini is probably one that many Arsenal fans would level at Wenger. He's got his idea of how the side should play and he has faith in his squad of players and believes they can implement it. Through any bad spells we have there are never fundamental changes but then it clicks - the players perform his system and we win games. From the long spells of good form I have seen under Pellegrini I can see why he keeps his faith in his original tactics. Minor tweaks as we saw vs. Chelsea at 1-0 and 10 men down saw us get a vital result. His tactics vs. Bayern at home and Roma away saw a recognition of what the opposition style of play was and how we could best counter it. It worked.

You don't have the success in the CL without tactical astuteness and clever man management. He hasn't won the thing no, but he's done very well with teams that haven't been expected to. Mancini has failed time and time again in the CL and he just couldn't figure it out with City. I'd agree that Pellegrini isn't perfect. Sometimes you'd love to see Mourinho's pragmatic approach to games just to ensure we get points from a game when under strength. But we didn't do that last season and it's probably the reason we won the league. We were positive and won a lot of games that we may have lost in previous seasons. The way we reacted at Goodison for instance, when 1-0 down last year.

 

[chris85mcfc]

You don't have the success in the CL without tactical astuteness and clever man management. He hasn't won the thing no, but he's done very well with teams that haven't been expected to. Mancini has failed time and time again in the CL and he just couldn't figure it out with City. I'd agree that Pellegrini isn't perfect. Sometimes you'd love to see Mourinho's pragmatic approach to games just to ensure we get points from a game when under strength. But we didn't do that last season and it's probably the reason we won the league. We were positive and won a lot of games that we may have lost in previous seasons. The way we reacted at Goodison for instance, when 1-0 down last year.

In all fairness mate, he is now manager of a team that is expected to do well in the CL, so he will be judged on that with a lot of pressure on his shoulders, far more than he had at Villareal or Malaga, arguably as much as he had at Real Madrid.

We quite simply have to show that pragmatism in Europe, it stands out like a sore thumb. The question is can he adjust the team to set up in that way? He proved that he can away in Rome, but the squad he had available kind of dictated that for him, im very interested to see how we set up in the home and away legs against Barcelona.

 

[George Hannah]

Hi there, I am a university student at the University of Central Lancashire undertaking some research on two football clubs and looking at the relationship between social media and football. I would really appreciate if you could give 5 minutes of your time to complete this short questionnaire. Thanks.

<a class="postlink" href="https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TW3BJ9H" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TW3BJ9H</a>

if I may say so I found those questions rather odd, twitter means nothing to me or any City fans I know. Your request is also inappropriately placed on this thread.

 

[Didsbury Dave]

Just to add my voice to the less reactionary posts that have appeared, I find the reaction to this defeat laughable, not only in sections of the media but amongst our own fans. "Middlesbrough outplayed us" seems to be a fairly regular narrative.

If you play that game with those teams and those gameplans twenty times we win nineteen and lose one. And this was the one. We absolutely and totally battered them before their goal. I've not watched the game or the highlights back but we should have been five up at half time, and they looked totally toothless. They got their flukey goal and then it was the Alamo, with them breaking at us as any team does when the opposition throw men forward. Our attacking play became frenetic and was certainly flawed: we got too narrow and I felt that the jovetic/lampard sub was a mistake.

It was disappointing but one of those games: Sergio isn't fit and the most important time of all for us to get YaYa and Nasri interchanging passes with silva around the box is when we are chasing a game against a packed defence.

We've had an incredibly poor season - for the second year running, and that's an issue needs looking at - with key injuries and absences and it feels like we've been waiting for months and months to put a full strength team out. The season could fizzle out over the next month or it could be set on fire again. I've seen enough of Pellegrini to believe that he will sort out this blip like he has done with all the others.

 

[80s Shorts]

I must have missed Mark Hughes signing Zab and Komps, then?

Mancini left nothing but a dressing-room fallen apart at the seams, players who had continually been told they were shit and needing punching in the face or were liars.

Seems to me, you want it both ways and refuse to give Pellegrini the credit for an incredible achievement, in his first season, where we became the most prolific team in British football history.

The only way is down, unless you expect a £48m cap on spending to be the difference in winning the title again, the League Cup, the FA Cup and Champions League this term.

You've already rightly identified and admitted what the solution is, and Pellegrini knows it too. The signing of Bony will allow him to go 4-4-2 as and when he needs to.

If you and others are using the stick that this isn't Pellegrini's team, then surely he should be afforded the same luxury as Mancini and Hughes, who combined, were allowed to spend over £500m.

The financial landscape has changed beyond recognition since we first started spending.

How much do we think Silva and Aguero would cost now?

Try £120m and upwards.

That is the context people have to work with when they start throwing names about who we should have signed.

I am not sure the market has not changed significantly from the market Mancini operated in, and transfer inflation, if anything, has stagnated due to the demands of complying with FFP.

But you are correct Silva and Aguero would be worth a small fortune and it is credit to the club that we purchased them when we did and they have developed to be worth those types of figures. Similarly you can add Yaya to that list who, in the context of the player he has become, was a snip at 24 million but many thought was over priced at the time.

The fact is the signings have been poor over the past three years. Fernandinho and Mangala at 32 million each (if not 42 million) were over priced and with Fernandinho's age will have very little sell on value.

The hard facts are the key players of the City side are still Mancini and to a lesser extent Hughes signings.

The key defensive signings weren't although Mancini did bring in the two left backs.

and then developed them into a cohesive defensive unit, which Hughes failed to do.

 

[cleavers]

Another constant complaint is “too much rotation”. This is the classic armchair complaint that is completely at odds with the modern game and the modern approach to sports science. Pellegrini doesn’t make unilateral decisions on who should be rotated when. It’s a decision the medical staff are involved in based on the fitness of certain players. You can’t continually ignore rotation whilst we win football matches but then blame rotation whenever we don’t win them. The manager for his part isn’t going to pick sides which he thinks are inferior simply for the sake of it, and he equally isn’t going to simply rotate for the sake of it.

I'm going to disagree here, you, me, and most others were saying pick the strongest side on Saturday, and yet we get 3 out 5 changes in defence again, this is not a rare occurrence , its the norm, so its little wonder that our defending for much of this season is below par. Now neither I, you, or anyone else, actually knows what the fitness people are saying about player fitness levels, but having had a week off in the warm, and having another week before the next match, I can't really see a reason for these defensive changes, week in, week out. We were fortunate to get past Sheff Wed in the previous round after similar changes, so a lesson should have been taken from that. To defend properly as a team we need to have some continuity, and we're not getting it, and in front of the back there are also constant changes, and this is not doing us any favours.

You know my views on the manager, but he's not helping himself, and while defending may not be his priority, we're not doing the business up front either, which means we need to be tighter at the back. We've let in 2 goals in 4 of the last 6 games (ignoring last weeks pointless friendly), and we haven't kept a clean sheet in 7 games, that's not the form of champions.

We had a great run after the home defeat by CSKA, but we were still letting in silly goals, and he rightly was praised during that run, but the defensive problems were still evident.

I'm not seeing the crisis that many in this thread are seeing, after all its only 3 games, 1 draw and 2 defeats, and in 2 of the 3, our opponents have probably had their best game of the season, but you can't escape the fact that we're badly off form since West Brom away, a month ago, and too many changes defensively is at the heart of it for me, I don't just mean in these last three games, I mean in the season as a whole. What is our best back 4 ? Do we know ? I know who I'd pick personally, but how many times have that back 4 played together this season ? In our 2 full back positions, we are taking a risk every time we play the back up players imho, even one of them. I'm not so troubled by the CB's, though Vinny's form is worrying because he's not doing the basics well right now, and I think we should pick a pair and stick with them (injury permitting), and I'm also thoroughly unconvinced about rotating keepers.

Nearly everyone's mantra for 'boro was play the strongest side, even the managers it seemed, and then he didn't, so its little surprise he's coming in for criticism over that decision.

The game itself was a bit misleading, firstly everyone sees the score and thinks we must have been poor, but by all accounts (I didn't see much of it, other than highlights) we played well first half (even Steve Claridge, who never gives us an ounce of credit said this), and probably should have been out of sight by half time, but yet again we didn't take our chances, a characteristic of this season. Then another characteristic of this season, we give away a stupidly poor goal, putting 'boro on the front foot, and giving them something to hold, and the ability to hit a weakened defence, quickly on the break. We still nearly pulled it level, only to see a second scored with almost the last kick of the match.

I'm not giving up on the season yet, we all know that typical City will lose at home to 'boro and then beat Chelsea (or Barcelona), but for me we need to stop rotating players when there isn't a need, if some of them don't like not playing, then tough shit, play better, and you won't be dropped, and that includes Milner, who's head is now clearly elsewhere.